Sunday, 31 July 2016

Big Finish Reviews+ Survivors Series 2 by Tony J Fyler

Survivors, Series 2

Tony Fyler wanders
about in the 70s.

Survivors, Series 1 was
one of the big hits of last year from Big Finish. By reinventing only the scope
and the terror of the original 1970s version of Terry Nation’s post-apocalyptic
dystopia, the company brought the fear of a cataclysmic plague with an
effectiveness that sometimes bordered on the genuinely uncomfortable – and
sometimes went right ahead and crossed the border. It was a superb four hours
of work, and we reviewed it here.

So – no pressure for
Series 2 then.

To be fair to Series 2,
let’s do some expectation-management: the further and further you go away from
the original action of the plague killing the vast majority of people on Earth,
the less inherently dynamic is your threat across the arc of your series. To
stand any chance of reaching or surpassing those initial horrors, you’re going
to need to focus on the worst in humanity, as well as the worst in the way of
post-apocalyptic natural accidents.

Survivors Series 2 knows
this, and delivers, though if you’re wondering whether it’s of the same overall
coherent-horror quality as Series 1, you’re probably going to come away just a
little nonplussed, for those reasons of distance from the original cataclysm of
the premise.

Breaking the second series
down into four threats is a seemingly straightforward exercise, especially when
episodes 2 and 3 cover the same time period, but in all honesty the quality is
a little more variable in Series 2 than Series 1. The threat of the first
episode, largely befalling Jackie (Louise Jameson) and Daniel (John Banks)
amounts to a combination of rural oafishness and meteorological misfortune, and
amounts to something of a damper squib than you might be hoping, especially
from long-experienced Big Finish director, but new writer Ken Bentley. There’s
a sense of futility, a ‘so-what?’ vibe that would render any death in this
episode a little pointless, though there are certainly lessons for Greg and
Abby here about how far each of them is prepared to go in their new, relatively
lawless world to get the results they want. But most particularly, if you’re
going to introduce a surprisingly unrecognisable Bernard Holley (Axon Man, for
the Who fans) as a recurring character, his actions here feel surprisingly slight
and lightweight, especially when seen in the light of what happens when his
character, Ridley, is reintroduced later in the series.

Episode 2, Mother’s
Courage by Louise Jameson, stretching her Who-writing repertoire into new
territory, is by far the best, strongest and most allegorical of the episodes
of this series. While the title and maybe a line or two feels a little
hippyish, there’s some serious meat in this story, dealing with rape, sex
slavery, the threat of violence, the destabilising influence of men on any
peaceful community and a shocking inversion of the usual media take on a
woman’s right to choose what happens to her body, particularly in the case of
pregnancy. The interesting thing is that the horror revealed here about ‘the
State’ and its decisions about what can happen and what can’t when a woman has
a child is a blank inversion of a situation already happening, though often in
reverse, in our real, pre-apocalyptic world today. From politicians, priests
and imams demanding women dress a certain way that offends them because
otherwise they’re ‘asking’ to be raped, to nations where babies of one sex are
inherently less valued and encouraged than those of another. The conclusions
Mother’s Courage comes to are interesting and deep, even if they’re not perhaps
as biting as they could be. In our world, just as in Jackie Burchall’s, biting
leads to nothing that’s good, so perhaps the way of Mother’s Courage, and its
author, who is growing into a distinctive voice in Big Finish, is best.

Still, the episode packs
the biggest punch of the four, by virtue of being absolutely about something,
which is more than can really be said of episodes 1 or 3.

Episode 3, to be
absolutely fair, is about something – just something that doesn’t make a whole
lot of sense. The premise is that there’s an escaped wild animal occasionally
slaughtering survivors, and there’s also a survivalist – in the strictly Bear
Grylls, Ray Mears style, rather than the stockpiling weapons and canned food
waiting for the government to come and take their guns style. Our band of men
go off in search of the survivalist and attempt to hunt the animal, while the
women are encountering the camp in which they spend Episode 2. Episode 3
involves a lot of tramping around the forest on this two-pronged quest, which
is fine if you’re into that kind of thing, but engaging audio drama it sadly
doesn’t make.

It does lead naturally
into Episode 4 though, and a vibe not far removed from some classic shlock
horror movies. At the risk of spoilering listeners, we’re in cannibal country,
but what stops this being just a case of ‘Let’s throw some cannibalism into the
mix, that’ll shock ’em’ territory is that there is a fundamental Survivors
question at the heart of Matt Fitton’s episode – how far is too far to go in a
world gone made and mostly dead. Would you eat human meat if you had to? If it
meant your survival?

What about if you didn’t
have to, but had discovered you quite liked it? Would you let the morals of a
society that no longer existed shackle you? Where on the scale of your birth,
life and education do your moral chips fall? Is there such a thing as absolute
good and evil, right and wrong? It’s strong stuff, and it bring back Bernard
Holley for a gritty showdown with Ian McCulloch, playing Greg.

What Survivors Series 2
delivers is four episodes exploring what life would probably be like in the
aftermath of a grand cataclysm. Episode 2 by Louise Jameson is the best and
most intriguing as an hour of drama, with Fitton’s Episode 4 coming second, and
Ken Bentley’s episodes, 1 and 3 sadly lacking a narrative focus – sadly because
Bentley’s a great Big Finish director, and you wish him well every minute of
both episodes, even though they don’t deliver the same punch as Jameson and
Fitton’s. At the end of it though, what Survivors Series 2 doesn’t feel like it
delivers is much in the way of progress – our core gang have tackled rapists, a
society of women, an escaped wild animal and a cannibal cult, but in terms of
Abby’s search for Peter, they’re no further on, and of the two potential new
joiners they encounter, one doesn’t pan, though it does give some rich
characterisation along the way, Tim Treloar impressing as Russell, and the
other, a seriously damaged young woman, Molly, is highly traumatised. Daniel too
is a heavily changed young man by the end of Episode 4, so overall, Series 2
feels like our band of survivors have taken two steps forward, and three or
four back.

That said, there’s
something inherently irresistible about Terry Nation’s concept, and the Big
Finish series builds faithfully on the original, so the answers to the two
questions you want to know are simple – yes, you should buy this one, and yes,
of course you’ll be back when Series 3 comes out in November. Oh, and just a
heads-up on that – Chase Masterson is in the cast list, we assume reprising her
kickass role as Maddie Price from Series 1.

Take a listen to
Survivors, Series 2 today, and keep up to date with what’s what in the
post-plague world.